Watch Your STEPP: Semantic Traversability Estimation using Pose Projected Features

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ægidius, Sebastian, Hadjivelichkov, Dennis, Jiao, Jianhao, Embley-Riches, Jonathan, Kanoulas, Dimitrios
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ægidius, Sebastian
Hadjivelichkov, Dennis
Jiao, Jianhao
Embley-Riches, Jonathan
Kanoulas, Dimitrios
author_facet Ægidius, Sebastian
Hadjivelichkov, Dennis
Jiao, Jianhao
Embley-Riches, Jonathan
Kanoulas, Dimitrios
contents Understanding the traversability of terrain is essential for autonomous robot navigation, particularly in unstructured environments such as natural landscapes. Although traditional methods, such as occupancy mapping, provide a basic framework, they often fail to account for the complex mobility capabilities of some platforms such as legged robots. In this work, we propose a method for estimating terrain traversability by learning from demonstrations of human walking. Our approach leverages dense, pixel-wise feature embeddings generated using the DINOv2 vision Transformer model, which are processed through an encoder-decoder MLP architecture to analyze terrain segments. The averaged feature vectors, extracted from the masked regions of interest, are used to train the model in a reconstruction-based framework. By minimizing reconstruction loss, the network distinguishes between familiar terrain with a low reconstruction error and unfamiliar or hazardous terrain with a higher reconstruction error. This approach facilitates the detection of anomalies, allowing a legged robot to navigate more effectively through challenging terrain. We run real-world experiments on the ANYmal legged robot both indoor and outdoor to prove our proposed method. The code is open-source, while video demonstrations can be found on our website: https://rpl-cs-ucl.github.io/STEPP
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_17594
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Watch Your STEPP: Semantic Traversability Estimation using Pose Projected Features
Ægidius, Sebastian
Hadjivelichkov, Dennis
Jiao, Jianhao
Embley-Riches, Jonathan
Kanoulas, Dimitrios
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Understanding the traversability of terrain is essential for autonomous robot navigation, particularly in unstructured environments such as natural landscapes. Although traditional methods, such as occupancy mapping, provide a basic framework, they often fail to account for the complex mobility capabilities of some platforms such as legged robots. In this work, we propose a method for estimating terrain traversability by learning from demonstrations of human walking. Our approach leverages dense, pixel-wise feature embeddings generated using the DINOv2 vision Transformer model, which are processed through an encoder-decoder MLP architecture to analyze terrain segments. The averaged feature vectors, extracted from the masked regions of interest, are used to train the model in a reconstruction-based framework. By minimizing reconstruction loss, the network distinguishes between familiar terrain with a low reconstruction error and unfamiliar or hazardous terrain with a higher reconstruction error. This approach facilitates the detection of anomalies, allowing a legged robot to navigate more effectively through challenging terrain. We run real-world experiments on the ANYmal legged robot both indoor and outdoor to prove our proposed method. The code is open-source, while video demonstrations can be found on our website: https://rpl-cs-ucl.github.io/STEPP
title Watch Your STEPP: Semantic Traversability Estimation using Pose Projected Features
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17594